


Enough

by rywaen



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, POV Second Person, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Skinny Winter, Skinny!Steve, Skinny!Steve/Winter Soldier!Bucky, just pure angst, mentions of gore, shrinkyclinks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 13:54:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1651025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rywaen/pseuds/rywaen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only good thing about being frozen was sometimes – only sometimes, when the ice had only just begun to creep into your muscles, your bones, your cells themselves, freezing absolutely everything without a shred of mercy – you could dream about him.</p>
<p>Can be read as shippy or friendship, you decide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to write something that involved skinny!Steve/ws!Bucky because of Blu (http://bluandorange.tumblr.com/) who is writing Turn Back the Clock (http://archiveofourown.org/works/1561445).
> 
> This was the angsty idea I had and I wrote it mostly because I've been trying to cope with the fact that my brother's cat died earlier tonight. So...yeah. Sorry my first fic in ages is horribly sad. And not beta'd at all. Hopefully my next one will be happier.

It’s not the first time, but it still flays your heart open just as it always has; seeing Steve in your memories. As fragmented and disjointed as they are, you would recognize his face even fresh after a clean wipe, open your eyes and see a faint smile in the corner of your eye before it faded and washed away just like the rest.

You never remember it happening afterwards, just a second of recognition, a moment where a memory slips free and makes you blink before you forget again. Gone like the light in the eyes of the one you’ve just killed.

The only good thing about being frozen was sometimes – only sometimes, when the ice had only just begun to creep into your muscles, your bones, your cells themselves, freezing absolutely everything without a shred of mercy – you could dream about him. For a long time, he was just a presence. Someone who was the voice in your head, even when you forgot what your own voice sounded like. Someone who would throw in a casual remark when you were on a mission and waiting to take the shot. A voice of reason, misplaced and unnecessary in the mind of a machine.

And yet there he was, and there he would stay.

If they had known, they would have taken him away from you. They wanted you clean and sanitary, not a single flaw in the system. They would take him away and you would have no way to stop them. During the brief times of your lucidity, you remembered each and every moment of seeing his smile, of hearing his voice, of feeling that warmth in your chest again. So, he was your little secret. Tucked away and remembered when you least expected it.

_“It’ll just be between us, right? Just like old times.”_

After a while, his presence became more like a constant silent companion, always standing just outside of the edge of your vision. There, watching, sometimes even speaking softly, but never seen. It was comforting at times, but unsettling at others. He was the one thing in your life that couldn’t be controlled; the only thing in your life that you wanted to be free, since you knew that you would never be.

The man on the bridge changed things. You had known that you knew him from the moment you saw him, perhaps even before then. He made you remember the name, the face that would linger on the edges of your vision and cling to your memories like he was clinging for life in the edges of your frayed and fragile mind. Clinging to a handrail on the edge of a speeding train, freezing cold lashing your cheeks and claiming you for eternity.

He called you by a name you’d never heard in your life, but it felt familiar somehow. It felt like coming home after a long day and finally having a reason to smile again. It felt like warmth and sunlight instead of ice and pain and rough, raw throats after screaming for innumerable hours. It sounded right in a world full of wrong.

At first, it hadn’t mattered. All that mattered was the mission, not some strange name that made you pause, not a face that looked familiar and you weren’t sure why.

You told them this when you returned. They wiped you clean. You knew they would, yet you told them anyway. As if it would change this time around. As if hoping that they would care would make things different.

It didn’t. It wouldn’t.

You awoke and something was missing. You didn’t see a smile out of the corner of your eye. You didn’t feel kind eyes gazing at you when you weren’t looking. You didn’t know the man on the bridge. You didn’t know that anything was missing in the first place.

You did know that you had a mission to complete, and that was all that mattered.

Your mission was your life. You had no life if there was no mission. There was only one thing for the asset to do, and that was to kill when told to kill. That was how it had been, how it was, and how it always would be.

You stood in front of the Target and you felt empty inside. Something was missing and you couldn’t place what it was. It clawed at your insides like a hungry beast desperate to get out and you felt raw and worn. He called you by a name you’d never heard in your life, assured you that he knew who you were and you knew him. He was lying. He had to be. You are a machine. Nothing more.

With a ferocity that came from deep within the depths of the drought that was your pool of emotions, you attacked. This was who you were. This was who you would always be.

The shield dropped. So did his fists. He looked at you with too-blue eyes and hope. It was familiar and it sliced through you with a honed blade that made your heart ache and your rage flow over. You are a _machine_ , you tell yourself. Nothing more.

He spoke about being your friend. About being there for you. He told you to finish it, not putting up a fight as he should. He was _lying_.

You are a machine.

You _were_ a machine.

What are you now?

Now, with the clicking and whirring of your malfunctioning arm, your hair hanging in your eyes, your insides feeling as if they are slipping and spilling and falling with a splat on the damp floor. Now, with the bruises you had inflicted on yourself in search of where the fatal cut lay, but finding none. A phantom pain in your gut, where metal was wrapped around what was left of your arm. An ache that wouldn’t go away. You sit in the darkness of the refuge you had sought out in a gutted out apartment somewhere just this side of Brooklyn. This place felt familiar to you, just like the Captain did. Just like those blue eyes did. It made you want to scream and kill and destroy, but all you could do was cry.

You had wanted to kill him for lying to you, for making you feel like you were forgetting something more important than your life, more important than the mission. Alternatively, you wanted to pull him close and ask him to please, _please_ tell you everything. Lost as you were, you would take anything besides the void in your own mind that was slowly swallowing you whole. You realize now that it has always been there, you were just too blind to see it before now.  

And then he fell. The helicarrier fell to pieces and you grabbed the solid part more out of reflex than anything. You watched him drop into the water, surrounded by debris, destined to drown. That was it. Mission completed.

But it wasn’t the Captain’s face you saw as he fell. It was the same face, on the same man, but with skinny everything and weak lungs and knobby knees and a stubborn streak that was bound to get him killed in a back alley someday soon. A punk.

You dove into the water after him and you don’t remember when you learned how to swim but you grab for him and drag him to shore. It’s harder than it should be and you realize your arm is injured, out of place from when the Captain wrestled with you high above on the helicarrier. You’re dripping wet and you look down at him. He’s bleeding – you did that, you shot him, but you didn’t kill him like you usually did, you hesitated – and he coughs up water as you leave him there. He will live and you have failed.

For a reason still unknown to you, your failure doesn’t feel fatal. It isn’t as jarring as it should be. You, who has never failed, feels more relief than fear out of failure. It in itself is a release. The collar falling away. Freedom spreading across your tongue and sliding down your throat and choking you on its way down.

You hide. Instead of finding your handlers, your masters, as you’re programmed to do, you run and you hide and you slip into the shadows expertly. Seamlessly, you blend in, find civilian clothes, find people that look as dirty and lost as you do, and you fit in. They taught you everything you know and now you’re determined to use that against them. They taught you everything. Everything but Steve.

You don’t know when you remembered his name. It arrived in your memory out of thin air and fit perfectly, as if it had been there all along and he just hadn’t seen it. You know your handlers never told you it, just called him the Target and the Mission and the Captain. You also know that you knew it before you went to the museum and saw his face.

Captain Steven G. Rogers. You read that on the wall in the museum, days after you remember. A week after you saved the man you were meant to kill. This man. You find out everything about him that you can, and then you find more than what you were expecting. You find a doppelganger of yourself.

There weren’t many times you got a chance to look at your own reflection, but you knew what you looked like well enough from the glimpses of reflection in the cryochamber. You knew enough to know that it was your face on the wall beside Captain America’s picture.

James Buchanan Barnes. A Sergeant.  Captain America’s closest friend. Steve’s best friend.

The name is familiar to you. The same name that the Captain called you on the helicarrier. Even so, nothing comes to mind when you read about James. Try as you might, you cannot recall anything that doesn’t have Steve’s face attached to it. You are not him. You do not have any memory from when your body held that man inside of it. You are not Bucky.

But you do remember Steve. Not the Steve that you saw on the bridge, helicarrier, dragged to shore. Not the man in the footage they play with accompanying cheerful, patriotic music. Not even when you see your face smiling while standing next to the Captain, nothing comes to you.

No, instead you remember cold nights and colder skin, rattling bones and coughs and wheezing. You remember blue eyes and soft golden hair and gaunt features that only got worse when you couldn’t afford food. You remember the sound of him waking in the middle of the night, gasping for air and searching frantically for his inhaler, your hand finding it in the darkness before his can. You remember pressing the medication to this lips and helping him breathe, murmuring soothing words into his ear as you rub his back.

You remember the sound of graphite and charcoal scratching against cheap paper as your eyes slid closed, sun on your face and a smile on your lips. You remember blinking in the light and asking if he was done yet, getting a huff and a quick answer in return. _“No, you jerk. I told you not to move. Lay back down before I sock ya’.”_ You remember not minding when he pins a portrait of your face up beside the others displayed on the bedroom wall.

You remember the way you dreamt about him when the ice crept into your core, his laugh being the last thing you heard echoing in your emptied head before you didn’t remember anything at all. One last moment of warmth and joy before it was all taken away.

At some point, he comes back to you. At first, you think it’s the Captain again, come to take you away from your carefully chosen hiding spot and drag you out into the world for everyone to demand answers from you. You think you’re going to have to fight him tooth and nail because you’re _not_ Bucky and you don’t think that you ever will be again.

It takes you only an hour to realize that he is only there in your mind. A hallucination. Skinny and short and not an ounce of muscle on him anywhere again. That Steve, the one you knew. The one Bucky knew before the war. Not the one the features that belonged to the Captain, just the kid from Brooklyn.

It’s been nineteen days and you don’t think you could ever go back into cryo even if they found you now.

_“You know, you’re never gonna get better if you just hide away in here all damn day.”_

At first, you just ignore him, curling further into yourself and pulling the brim of the hat further over your eyes as you settle into the corner of the gutted room. You know you smell bad, you haven’t ever bathed, not that you can remember. Your joints hurt and you’re pretty sure that your arms need both medical and mechanical attention. Your stomach rumbles and it frightens you enough to make you jump.

_“You should eat, Buck. It’s not good for you to skip meals when you don’t have to.”_

He had moved when you weren’t looking, coming across the room to curl up beside you with his back to the wall, his big blue eyes meeting yours when you turned with a stubbornness that told you that he wouldn’t let you live it down if you didn’t eat. You licked your lips and tried to speak but your throat was too dry to force anything out. Panic rose inside you but he just looked at you with a calm look of patience and expectation. You swallowed and tried again, forgetting that he wasn’t really there and speaking out loud anyway.

“What’s the point?” you asked, the first thing you had said to anyone since the Captain on the helicarrier.

_“Point is you’ll die if you don’t take care of yourself, Buck. You can’t just stop caring when you don’t have me around to remind you, ya’know.”_

“What if I don’t care?” you ask again, your voice even softer than before.

At first there is no answer and you look back to where he was, heart racing when you don’t see him there. He left you, you think, you’re alone again. But instead you see that he is sitting in front of you, legs crossed and a stern expression on his face.

_“Don’t you dare.”_

“Don’t I dare, what?”

_“Don’t you dare give up like that. C’mon, what happened to the Bucky I knew?”_

“He died,” you tell him, voice hard and biting as you bring your knees closer to your chest and shove your face into your knees. Your arm still aches as the metal one clicks and whirs and tries to fix itself but there’s something wrong and you don’t know how to fix it. You don’t know how to fix any of this. You are broken and your mind is broken and the world is breaking around you too.

_“Now that’s just not true. If the Bucky I knew died, why the hell would I be sitting around flappin’ my lips to you, huh?”_

You don’t sit up and look at him, not when it hurts even more now. Your eyes are wet and your chest feels like it’s being cracked open and your breathing is ragged and choked as you begin to sob. Everything hurts. Pain is all you know, all you’ve ever known, and it is time to accept that once more. You startle as it almost feels as if there are arms wrapping around you in a hug, but the illusion falls away when you force yourself to remember that he isn’t there.

You are alone and it has never hurt as much as it hurts right then.

_“Bucky?”_

“Don’t call me that!” you shout, head whipping up fast and finding nothing in front of you, just an empty apartment and the darkness that surrounds you. Everything that you deserve sits in this room with you. Even without remembering more than fragments and sensations from a distant past, you know that you aren’t a good man. You aren’t Bucky Barnes because Bucky Barnes was a hero and the greatest friend Captain America had ever had.

You are not that man. You are not a man at all. You’re a broken machine and you close your eyes and wish that the feeling of thin fingers wiping away your tears was real. But you know that you wouldn’t deserve it if it was.

_“Don’t cry, okay? You’re not allowed ‘t cry because then I’ll start cryin’ too and then we’ll both be a wreck.”_

Even then, you couldn’t stop, not even knowing if you wanted to at that point. Instead, you just hid your face in your knees again and ignored the hunger pangs in your guts and the feeling of what could only be your heart breaking. After all this time, only just now had it finally begun to shatter.

Until now, you hadn’t known exactly what you had lost. What _Bucky_ had lost when you were placed in his head and he was forced out of it. They had left you as an empty shell, only filling it with missions and lies and dependency until now. You could see that now through a frosted glass pane that was just transparent enough to see shapes.

Guilt filled you, both for taking the life of James Buchannan Barnes, and for keeping the fragments of memory from him and calling them your own. These were not yours to keep. Steve was not yours to love. But you were all that was left.

You are all that will ever be left.

Sobs wrack your body – Bucky’s body – and you feel the phantom touch once more, rubbing soothing circles into your back just as you once did for him.

_“Shh, it’s okay. I’m here, bud. I’ve gotcha. ‘M not goin’ anywhere.”_

“Steve,” you choke out, the name getting caught in your throat, muffled against the dirty fabric of your jeans. Tears still keep your face wet, sobs wracking your body as your metal hand grasps your injured shoulder and grips it hard enough to leave bruises that won’t fade as fast as they usually would. You feel as if you’re breaking apart into a million different pieces and you are the only thing holding yourself together. Jagged edges mismatched and held together with cheap glue.

You beg for him, choking out his name through your sobs, because the memory of him is all you have left. It is all you have. A bastardized version of a man that you used to know, comforting you so that you might not feel quite so hopeless, at least for a few moments. And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough.

_“M’right here, Buck. Never gonna leave you, don’t you worry about a thing. Not a damn thing.”_


End file.
